Life From Above

Amen. Please turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 26. We'll be looking near the end of this chapter in Isaiah 26.

Specifically, we'll be looking at one of the most significant passages in the Old Testament to speak of the resurrection.

The New Testament speaks of the resurrection often. The Old Testament, not as frequently, but this is one of the ones where it barely clearly speaks of the resurrection.

Please stand when you have Isaiah 26 for the reading of God's word. We'll begin in verse 16.

O Lord, in distress they sought you. They poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them.

Like a pregnant woman who rise and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you,

O Lord. We were pregnant, we writhe, but we have given birth to wind. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the inhabitants of the world have not fallen.

Your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust awake and sing for joy, for your due is a due of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.

You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this wonderful prophecy of Isaiah, for this wonderful promise for us.

We thank you that you have provided for us a resurrection in Jesus Christ.

And Lord, I pray that you would help us to fix our eyes on him today as we come to you in worship. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, life is a struggle. Life is generally a struggle. But if I asked you, what is it a struggle against, what would you say?

There's all kinds of things you could say. You could say it's against difficult bosses, difficult friends, difficult circumstances, paying bills, things like that.

But ultimately, the thing that life is a struggle against is death. Life is a struggle against death.

And who succeeds in that struggle against death? No one. No one is capable of struggling against death and succeeding.

And so everyone's life, this struggle, ultimately ends up in failure, apart from Jesus Christ, apart from the one who did face death and live, the one who is resurrected from the dead and leads all those who trust in him to life as well, grants them eternal life that they might also rise from the dead.

And this is precisely what Isaiah is going to be talking about here, this hope of resurrection that we cannot save ourselves, the people of Israel could not save themselves from their enemies, but God will save us.

And in fact, he will save us through something glorious, allowing us to suffer defeat by death in one sense, but then another, raising us from the dead.

This is the great Christian hope. So first, we cannot, we cannot save ourselves, but God can save us.

So looking at verse 16, O Lord, in distress they sought you. They poured out a whispered prayer when your discipline was upon them.

So this, speaking of the people of Israel and the oppressions that they faced, specifically the various enemies that came against them, they could not defeat their enemies.

They had to cry out to the Lord. And something that they failed to recognize is that this was discipline from the

Lord. This is discipline from the Lord. You know, we have trials in our lives, all sorts of things that come against us, but do you recognize these things as ultimately being discipline from the

Lord? The Bible says that illegitimate children God does not discipline, but those who are truly his children he does discipline.

He sends them trials in order to teach them things, in order to instruct them to be patient.

Now, there are some who he has not disciplined, and so they also go through trials in this life.

And what are their trials? Well, their trials are simply the effects of sin. They are simply the result of the curse.

They are punishment. They're something that separates the trials of the believer from the trials of the unbeliever, something that makes one a gift from God for good and makes the other something that does not end in anything good at all.

How can you know? How can you know which category you fall in?

Maybe you have trials and you think that they are all from God and that God is leading you through them, but you are not of God and God is not leading you through them.

How would you know? Or maybe you feel that your trials are coming against you and they're just situations that you're in.

They don't have any defined purpose. How would you know whether or not these trials are from God or just circumstances, or whether or not they are from God for your good or from God not for your good?

Well, the answer is simply found in this. They poured out a whisper of prayer. They sought you.

This is how you can know the difference between discipline and punishment, is are you seeking the

Lord? If that discipline is producing that effect in you of causing you to cry out to the

Lord, it is definitionally discipline. Now, someone might despair that they can't know whether or not their trials are discipline or not.

You can know. You can know by seeking the Lord, and once you seek the Lord, there you have your answer.

There it is. It is discipline. It is for your good, and God is gracious and merciful to those who seek him.

He gives them answers to their prayers. He grants them all sorts of strength that they might bear up under these trials.

So when you face trials, when you face difficulties, take a hint from this passage that you should go to the

Lord and ask him what it is he is trying to teach you in this circumstance. Ask what patience is he trying to produce in you?

Which sin is he addressing? Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that every trial that you undergo is a response to sin in such a way that, for example, if someone commits a sin that gets them in law and they go to prison, that's very clearly related to that sin.

Some troubles that we go into are actually related to the fact that we are righteous. It's because of righteousness that we suffer.

But regardless, in every one of those circumstances, whether we're suffering for righteousness or suffering for some sin that we've committed,

God is strengthening us. He is using that to discipline us the way that a runner would be disciplined, right?

A runner punishes his body in a way that produces strength.

So whenever you're in any difficult circumstance, ask the Lord what he is teaching you.

Ask the Lord what strength is he producing in you.

We have to learn to know ourselves. We cannot know ourselves in one sense, because to know something, you have to be able to observe it, to look at it, but we are ourselves.

We can't know ourselves in this way. Psalm 19 .21

says, who can discern his errors? Jeremiah talks about the deceitfulness of the heart.

It is incredibly difficult for a person to know what it is they need, to know their errors, to know their weaknesses, and we must call out to the

Lord for these things. You know, speaking of the difficulty in knowing our own selves, there's a poet

I really like named John Davies. He was an old Anglican poet, and he talked about this.

He actually has a very long poem, like a book -length poem, called Know Thyself.

And one of these parts in it where he's talking about the difficulty of understanding oneself, he says, to judge herself, this is speaking of the soul.

Her here is the soul. To judge herself, she must herself transcend, as greater circles comprehend the less.

But she wants power, her own powers to extend, as fettered men cannot their strength express.

So there's a sense in which the soul has all the capacity to know itself. You know, it can understand propositions that are fed to it.

If someone tells you something about yourself, you can learn that. On the other hand, the soul is entirely incapable of understanding itself.

Just as a strong man in shackles has strength, but can't use that strength to do the thing that he might do with his strength.

And so we need someone who lives not only outside ourselves, but even outside of humanity in general, to tell us what we are, to help us to know ourselves.

And the way that God has decided to educate us is most frequently through these trials, through discipline, through allowing us to see our own weakness up front and personal, and then learning from him that we must trust in him.

So when these trials come, do not try to just grit your teeth and bear through it.

Rather, turn to the Lord, recognizing that these things are from him. These things are him teaching us, one who transcends us, teaching us who we are.

This task of knowing who God is and knowing who we are are, in a way, the same task.

Because we cannot know ourselves apart from knowing who we are in relationship to God.

And we cannot know who God is apart from knowing ourselves in his world as mere creatures.

If you've ever read Calvin's Institutes, this is what he starts off with, the first chapter, the impossibility of knowing oneself without knowing

God and knowing God without knowing oneself. So we should call out to God when we go through trials.

Do not try to go through it. These are instead situations that are teaching us to call out to him for him to teach us who we are and what our needs are.

It goes on in verse 17, speaking of this picture of a pregnant woman.

Like a pregnant woman who rise and cries out in her pangs when she is near to giving birth, so were we because of you,

O Lord. We were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind.

We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world have not fallen.

See, mankind cannot accomplish anything on his own. A lot of times when you go through a struggle, you expect something good to come out of it in the end.

For example, if you exercise, that's difficult, but you expect some kind of strength or athletic ability to come out of that.

If you undergo surgery, it's painful, but you hope to be healthier through that thing.

Generally, when you go through difficult times, you're hoping for something to to come out of that. The same with pregnancy.

With pregnancy, it's difficult for a woman, it's hard on her body, especially childbirth itself, but then in the end, she has something wonderful.

She has a child. Now, the same is true with all trials. All trials can produce something wonderful if we turn to the

Lord. Apart from turning to the Lord, they don't produce anything. We can have nothing from them.

Can you imagine a situation like the that Isaiah is describing here? A woman who is who's in pain and ends up giving birth just to win.

You know, this is speaking of the people of Israel fighting against their enemies, struggling and struggling, and thinking that they would win through that struggle, but in the end, nothing.

In the end, just exile. Now imagine that. You've probably heard, I don't know, at least

I have, these bizarre stories of someone who doesn't realize they're pregnant and then, you know, ends up going into labor, and because of their obesity or whatever the situation is, they just had no idea until that moment.

But imagine the opposite, where, you know, you have morning sickness, your belly is growing in size, and then you feel yourself going into labor.

You go to the hospital, you're delivering, and you know it's over, and you ask the doctor, well, is it a boy or a girl?

And he said, actually, it was just a bad case of gas. There was nothing there. This is the kind of disappointment.

This is the kind of disappointment due to everyone who would trust in themselves rather than in the

Lord. We must, we must trust in the Lord. But you have, in verse 16, that statement.

O Lord, in distress they sought you. They poured out a whispered prayer. This is where deliverance comes from.

It does not come from us. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth. Rather, it comes from seeking out to the

Lord. In distress they sought you. They poured out a whispered prayer.

If God is teaching us through our trials, then it most certainly is the case that we should not expect any of these trials to go away apart from seeking him.

Who would expect that? You know, if you are in a school, and you're getting sick of this math class, and so you decide that, well,

I'm not just not going to, you know, I'm not going to pay attention. I'm just going to get through it, and at the end of it, what happens?

You end up in summer school. You don't actually get out of the class. You just have to do the class again. This is precisely what goes on in the

Christian life. The more that we try to bear through our trials ourselves, the more we're guaranteeing that we will get stuck in an extended study session as the

Lord teaches us his ways. Instead, we must turn to him in prayer, earnest prayer.

Prayer that, and this is kind of the essence of prayer, confesses our weaknesses, our need for him.

When we're coming to God, we're acknowledging that we can't do anything. We are helpless on our own.

We are fully relying on you, and it is through doing that, through that humbling of spirit, that one is actually delivered from trials, because the

Lord seeks to teach us not only that we are weak, but also that he is strong, that he is capable of delivering us, that he is capable of giving us whatever strength is needed.

You know, not every circumstance in this life will be, will be, every difficult circumstance will be taken away, but at minimum, the

Lord will give us strength. Consider, consider what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12 when he was talking about the thorn in his side.

God didn't take it away, but God gave him strength to bear through it. He is strong in his weakness.

Paul is. Paul's strong in our weakness. When we acknowledge our weakness, we have sufficient strength to bear through anything when we, when we are calling out to the

Lord. In verse 19, speaks of this resurrection that God provides.

Your dead shall live, their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust awake and sing for joy.

This is speaking very clearly of a bodily resurrection. This is, this is the great

Christian hope, and maybe you have heard it said by a modern -day

Jewish person or someone else that the Old Testament does not teach a resurrection.

That is patently false. You have here this verse, you have verses in Job and elsewhere, and you even consider

Jesus' own words, where Jesus appeals to the fact that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to prove the resurrection.

The resurrection is everywhere in the Old Testament, even if it's not there with the same kind of clarity that it is in the

New, but even here you have such clarity. A lot of times

I find that because many Christians have not studied the Bible as they ought or are more immature in their walk, they're very susceptible to these sorts of claims from people who seem to know more.

Oh, this person is Jewish, they must really know their Old Testament. Just because, you know, they're

Jewish does not mean they know the Old Testament. That is a, that is a very common mistake that people make.

Just because you're a Christian, does that mean you know the Bible inside out? Oftentimes it doesn't. Most of the time it doesn't, and this is the case for, for many of other religions as well.

So do not, yeah, do not fall prey to any of that kind of deception. The Old Testament is very clear that there is a, there is a resurrection.

And consider the basis on which this resurrection is offered. It says, your dead shall live.

Now who, who is being spoken to at this moment? Oh Lord, in verse 16, because of you, oh

Lord, in verse 17. Now in the middle of 19, it says, you who dwell in dust, it changes and starts speaking to the dead.

But prior to that, it's still, still speaking to the Lord. Your dead shall live. These are

God's bodies. In fact, when it says their bodies shall rise, I'm not sure why the

ESV renders this. Their older translations say, my, this is something I need to look into more, but older translations say this twice, your dead, and then it switches to God's point of reference.

It says, my body shall live. Regardless, just this first part of verse 19, your dead shall live.

These are God's dead. These are his bodies. He possesses them. This is the same argument that Jesus is making.

Because he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is the God, not of the dead, but of the living.

He possesses his bodies, and that gives a guarantee of what will happen to them.

They will not rot forever, but they will see life. Now those who are not his bodies, everyone, everyone will be raised from the dead bodily, right?

Both the wicked and the righteous. However, there are some whose bodies are not the

Lord's in this sense, and so they will be raised up with a resurrection of, not of gloriousness, but of dishonor.

And so that's not, this is not promising the same kind of resurrection to anyone. This is promising a resurrection particularly to those whose bodies are possessed by the

Lord. He is the owner of them. You know, the Lord, think about lordship.

What is lordship? It's ownership over everything, right? If he is our Lord, he owns us, he owns who we are, he owns even our bodies.

Not just our souls, but even our bodies. And he will preserve them. He will preserve those bodies.

It goes on here, and it says, you who dwell in dust, awake and sing for joy.

For your due is a due of life, and the earth will give birth to the dead.

And let me say one more thing before we move on to that, which is that, uh, something that a lot of people don't realize is they think that when their soul is, is separate from their body, the body ceases to kind of have meaning.

And maybe it will have meaning later when it's risen from the dead. But verses like this let us know that the body still has meaning, even while it is in the grave.

It still is God's, even in that state. As the catechism puts it, that our bodies are still united to Christ.

You think about that, uh, covenantal union between us and Christ that guarantees our status.

The same is true, not just of our souls, but of our bodies. Now it says here, those who dwell in dust will awake and sing for joy.

For your due is a due of light. Now this is a common image of what death is.

It is dwelling in the dust. It is a sort of sleep that is awaiting resurrection. And in speaking of what will bring life, it calls it due or light, right?

So light defeats the darkness. Due defeats that dustiness. This is describing

God's power to give life. It is a, uh, yeah, it is a picture of this body that's dead and decayed and dusty, uh, becoming whole again, becoming flesh again, becoming, uh, fully brought back.

But once again, uh, these are not things that are accomplished by our own will.

Obviously they cannot be. They are something that's accomplished by God. When I first moved to this area,

I was very impressed by a lot of things, of course. You know, I'm totally new. The flora and the fauna were all, uh, very unusual to me.

But one of the things that really astounded me was just how it never rained, and yet all the grass was green.

I was just, I was just so shocked by this. I just didn't understand. And one day I was walking to work, and I walked across the lawn, and I'm like, and the ground is wet.

I don't understand how the ground is wet. There's just a due that comes up. And, and, you know,

I just thought it was just this natural thing. And then later I realized, oh wait, there's irrigation systems everywhere here that, that keep the ground wet.

You know, I thought it was just something that was going to happen naturally, but it was something that someone else had to do intentionally to keep the ground alive.

This is the case with the life that God gives. Okay, it's not something that's just going to happen naturally. You're not just going to wake up in glory one day by your own accord, or of your own power, or something natural.

It is something supernatural. It's something where we must go to the Lord. We must go to Him, leaving behind any trust in ourself, calling out to Him for mercy.

We must recognize that resurrection comes from Him, and Him alone. And even in this life, even in this life, the life that we can have comes from Him, and Him alone.

You know, these, these statements about our bodies, about life, these are truths that apply even here and now.

The way the New Testament encapsulates this, it talks about us having been raised to sit with Christ on high.

Even now it talks about this in Ephesians 2 and Colossians 3. In Colossians 3, it says, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.

So it's not just the case that we have this life eventually, but this is something that we have now.

Our life is already hidden with Christ in God on high. This is something that's already the case.

You do not only need the resurrection for the future, but you need to be born again even now.

You need that life even now, and this is not something that can be produced by the will of man, but it is something that is only produced by the will of God, as we trust in the one and only

Savior, Jesus Christ. And the earth will give birth to the dead.

Now think about that. We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth, and the earth will give birth to the dead.

We can't. We can't bring up the bodies from the earth. Only God can. The earth gives birth.

We can't even give birth, right? There's two, there's two, uh, analogies being made there. There's earth and earth, and there's birth and birth, right?

Uh, can we produce life? Can we produce life? No, only God can. Can we bring up bodies from the earth?

No, only the Lord can. Let's go to Him in resurrection hope we have in Jesus Christ.

We thank you for sending Him. We thank you for Him dying for us and for being raised again, uh, purchasing us for us a glorious inheritance, a glorious future, a glorious resurrection.

We ask that we would have our eyes set on Him, that we would have our focus on this future, and Lord, I also pray that you would teach us to heed your discipline, that we would not be ones who ignore this, who need more teaching, who are like, um, illegitimate children who are not your own, but that we would, as true children, learn from your discipline, and that we would trust in you for all things, that we would turn more and more away from self -trust and more and more toward you.